Talk:Serendipity

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Serendipity article.
This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.
New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help.

Article policies

Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Archives: 1

Linguistics: Applied Linguistics Low‑importance

	Linguistics portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Linguistics, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of linguistics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.LinguisticsWikipedia:WikiProject LinguisticsTemplate:WikiProject LinguisticsLinguistics
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.
	This article is supported by Applied Linguistics Task Force.

Invention

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Invention, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Invention on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.InventionWikipedia:WikiProject InventionTemplate:WikiProject InventionInvention
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.

Tip: Anchors are case-sensitive in most browsers.

This article contains broken links to one or more target anchors:

[[Names of Sri Lanka#Ceylon, Serendip and related names|Serendip]] The anchor (#Ceylon, Serendip and related names) has been deleted by other users before.

The anchors may have been removed, renamed, or are no longer valid. Please fix them by following the link above, checking the page history of the target pages, or updating the links.

Remove this template after the problem is fixed | Report an error

A fact from this article was featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the On this day section on January 28, 2024.

zemblanity definition

the article says that zemblanity is an "unpleasant surprise", but that contradicts the earlier description of it being "making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries occurring by design", or in other words "an unpleasant, and unsurprising thing". urban dictionary also seems to say that it is an unpleasant and unsurprising thing, rather than an unpleasant and surprising thing, though that isn't exactly a reliable source — Preceding unsigned comment added by 73.22.28.168 (talk) 01:00, 28 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

No, it says it's an "unpleasant unsurprise". Drmies (talk) 01:02, 28 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. The first sentence defining the term as unhappy, unlucky discoveries can be confirmed by other sources. The second sentence referencing an "unpleasant surprises" is not only inconsistent, but unsourced. On the latter grounds alone, I deleted it. And added a new cite, which speculates on the word's origin, without trying to redefine the term. Barte (talk) 17:24, 28 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Portrait of Bianca Capello

"When Mann acquired and gifted Walpole with the portrait of Bianca Capello, he questioned its traditional attribution to the Florentine painter Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1573), suggesting, supported by local connoisseurs, Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) instead. [..] The attributions to Bronzino and Vasari are, however, unlikely for chronological reasons, whilst that to Alessandro Allori seems more probable." (Strawberry Hill House) This note is just to explain why I removed the reference to Vasari here. Gunnar (talk) 10:10, 5 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Open Mind

@Barte: I don't understand your comment while removing "combined with an open mind" and the reference [1]. First, the introduction is an introduction because there are other chapters. In smaller articles with no substructures, the whole blob of text can be seen as 'introduction'. Therefore, it is not forbidden to have a reference in the intro. Even the lead section of Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lead section uses references. As Merton was the guy who familiarized the concept of serendipity in the science domain during the second half of the 20th century, I still believe it is very helpful to have this reference in introduction, together with the pointer towards Walpole, who coined the term (but the word was used only rarely in the decades after his death [2]).

Then, the definition tells us that serendipity is not just a happy coincidence, it needs to meet an open mind, which curiously inspects the happy finding. (Fleming could have just thrown the moldy petri dish away, but didn't and wondered what had happened.) The article says so: "'active luck', where chance encounters and human action come together" and "the crucial role of human agency". As the human body is controlled by his mind, and as Merton himself spoke of a "prepared mind", I can't understand what your problem is. Due to the nature of WP:Copyright violations it is common practice to rephrase an essential content, and not to copy & paste text from elsewhere. Gunnar (talk) 11:01, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]